Creating Innovative Rules for Ancient and Medieval Tabletop Combat

Painting the Perry Mounted Ment-at-Arms

As some of you may recall I’m not really into the painting part of this hobby. Mainly because it takes me forever to paint figures and then only to a basic tabletop standard. I do have some interest in getting a few of my Perry MAA’s on to the table so I started painting just four so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed. I’m considering deploying my cavalry in groups (lances) of fours or threes: One knight, one or two MAA’s, and one medium cavalryman that can serve as coustiller/pricker/banner bearer/or French mounted “archer”.

(I will also deploy pages but at a much smaller ratio between pages and knights than would be historical. They will be kept as remount markers separate from the offensive arm of the lance.)

Below are work in progress pics. I still have some lighter whites to go over the feathers and the coustillers uniform. I also need to add some warm and cold glazes to the human skin. I might go for some more detail work if I feel inspired.

This whole business with the French “archers” is interesting: I recall that in Samuel Shellaberger’s “Prince of Foxes” (Skälmarnas Furste – yes, yes it is a fictional thing, I know) they are portrayed as some lowly types comparable to English peasant archers in way of rank or position within an army. And in behavior, comparable almost to Swedish crossbow peasants (1100-1250?) in refinement and class.

But they weren’t as lowly? If you are going to field them with these fine cavaliers, I may have misinterpreted their “refinement-level” or maybe S. Shellaberger didn’t really care about the history and just disliked the French? A mundande question from a moderately historically interested person, but do please enlighten me!

Maximilian — Since pages seems so important historically for knights its nice to represent that somehow. I’ll probably give a bonus/special ability to knights that are within line of sight to a group of remounts and pages.

Llama — The key word here is “mounted”. I know that french archers were considered of lower quality then their English/Welsh counterparts but the mounted archers that I mention are something else. They are basically medium (or heavy depending on how you define it) cavalrymen that support the knight (or gendarme in French parlance). I was wrong in my post though as they appear to be heavier and more combat oriented than the coustiller. At least according to this http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_armies_french.html. It seems that they carried bows for dismounted use if needs arose. Appears to have had much higher status than regular archers.

BTW) Have you seen the (somewhat) new series Sherlock Holmes, where Bilbo (Freeman) is Watson – a really good Watson – and the Necromancer [long awesome name IRL] plays Sherlock? I can highly recommend this. Three 1,5 hour episodes per season…